Spiked (8 page)

His smile fell and he said, “And then you are here, with us, under this bridge. And you steal for money, smash and grab. It is a circle.”

Gabrielle clapped lightly. “I love to hear you talk,” she told Leo. To Eddie, she said, “Couldn't he have been a professor?” She didn't wait for an answer. Instead, she wrapped a tourniquet of torn nylons around her left biceps and slid up her sleeve. Swollen needle marks ravaged her forearm like little purple leeches. Leo gave her the needle.

Eddie had seen enough. He crawled to his suit. His wallet was still in the jacket pocket. The crisp twenty-dollar bill he had was gone—probably on its way into Gabrielle's arm. Small price to pay for a lift from the canal, he decided. His cell phone and shoes were gone, but his keys had survived the trip down the canal in his pants pocket. He left the suit for Leo. It was too small anyway.

Gabrielle pulled out the needle and slipped the syringe behind her ear like a pencil. After just ten seconds, she tilted her head back and moaned, “Candy-coated.”

Leo lit the candle again. Eddie's mind raced for the right way to ask if they'd sit for an interview. Sweet-talking was out—they had no vanity to flatter. A direct approach, he decided. He said, “Aren't you guys curious about what I was doing in the canal?”

Leo shook his head. “You made somebody mad, probably. You are not the first. I do not want to know any more.”

“That's right,” Eddie said. “I'm a writer at the paper. I got in trouble sticking my nose where I shouldn't. Look, I need a new story, and I think you two would be great.”

Gabrielle said nothing. Did she even hear him?

Leo thought for a moment and then dismissed the idea. The approaching train grew louder. Under the bridge, the noise echoed chaotically. Leo spoke up over the rumbling, “Us? Nobody wants to read about what they wish did not exist.”

Not exactly a yes, but short of a no. There was hope.

“People need to see their community, all of it,” Eddie shouted. “If they don't like something, maybe that forces them to do something about it.”

“Like run us out of here?”

That was still not a no. “Like getting you some housing and more treatment. Maybe by spending more money on the methadone clinic.” Over Leo's shoulder, a chewed-up black cat spied on the humans from behind a pile of empty soup cans. It was missing half an ear. Eddie pointed to the cat, “And by getting that guy a warm home.”

Leo looked. “That is Ghost Cat. He will not eat if we are watching.” He poured more cat food onto the cement. “Pretend he is not here. Be busy for a minute.”

A silver freight train barreled into view. Eddie crawled toward his suit to check the pockets again, but stopped at the stained Polo wallet he had found in the jacket. No money inside, no family photos. There was a Massachusetts driver's license in a credit card slot. Eddie knew the face.

The wallet belonged to Daniel P. Nowlin.

Leo was paying Eddie no attention. He knelt beside the candle, melting more heroin. He tilted the tin to collect the brew in a corner. The edge of the metal box split the fire into a forked tongue.

A guttural roar escaped Eddie's throat. He scrambled on all fours to Leo, grabbed his overcoat and slammed him to the cement. The cat hissed and dashed away. Adrenaline hardened Eddie's lazy muscles. He stuck the wallet in Leo's face and screamed over the roar of the approaching train, “Where did you get this?”

Leo whimpered. He struggled to wrench free. He was so weak.
How did he ever carry me up here?
Eddie gripped Leo's coat with both hands and shook him.

“Where did you get this?”

“Found it,” he stammered.

“You found it where?”

“Let me go.”

Eddie pulled him close and spoke slowly. “Tell me where you found this wallet or you're going over the ledge.”

The train sped into the shadow of the bridge on a cyclone of wind. Paper hamburger wrappers around the ledge danced in glee.

Leo looked Eddie in the eye, and then glanced past him, over Eddie's shoulder.

Eddie turned to see. Too late. The snakeskin-tattooed man was planted behind him. He cocked a four-foot length of firewood like a baseball bat. Eddie shut his eyes.

“Snake!” Gabrielle's voice was loud over the train, but calm.

Eddie looked in time to see Snake check his swing. Nobody moved. The four of them waited as the train clattered under them. Their eyes blinked out swirling dust. Eddie coughed. The last car finally passed, sucking the energy from a furious cloud of paper trash under the bridge, which floated, exhausted, to the ground.

Gabrielle shouted at Eddie, “We buy from a guy in the Acre who works the projects near the canal. We were walking to meet him when we took the wallet off a guy, okay? He was in the water, just like you were. But he was dead, froze like ice, that guy, and beat to shit. He didn't need the money.”

Eddie let Leo go. Both men panted. Eddie's hands trembled with unused adrenaline. Could he believe them?
If they killed Danny, why save me?

“I'm sorry,” Eddie said. He held up Nowlin's license. “I knew this man. I think somebody killed him. And I thought—you folks saved my life. I had no business—” His head ached behind his eyes.

Leo smiled beige. “You shocked me,” he said. “Passion is rare among the numb.” He glanced to the tracks. “Would you have thrown me off the ledge?”

Eddie shook his head. “A bluff.”

Leo grinned at Gabrielle. “Do you think it is safe to sit for an interview with this man?” he asked her. “Maybe we pick someplace lower to the ground, eh?”

Chapter 11

Eddie planned the structure of the story while under a scalding shower at home. He'd open with Leo and Gabrielle under the bridge, recreating the first time they shot up together on the ledge. Then he'd flash back to earlier in their lives, and tell their story chronologically from there. The story would need a hundred and fifty inches of newsprint to be told right, he figured.

Reporters dreamt about this kind of material. Maybe this story could win the Associated Press editor's award Eddie had been chasing for years. That was a ticket to a big-city daily.

Eddie left a message at the police station for Detective Orr. He was battered and aching, joyful to be alive, and done nosing into Nowlin's death, but Orr needed to hear about the old triple-decker, and about the two guys who had dumped him in the canal.

The news deadline had long passed by the time Eddie dragged into work in mid-afternoon. Reporters slouched around their desks, working the phones without the pressure of deadline.

Boyce Billips, the paper's editorial intern, dashed to Eddie. He was a tiny, nervous kid of twenty-one, with a pinched face and a giant triangular slab of nose. You couldn't plug Boyce's nostrils with Spanish olives, though it might be funny to try. Boyce was the product of too much therapy; he was an over-analyzed hypochondriac addicted to his own ailments. Some people coddled Boyce and his neuroses; Eddie liked him too much for that, though he was annoyed with Boyce at the moment over the useless emails he perpetually forwarded to Eddie's account, usually health warnings for diseases nobody had ever heard of.

Boyce looked whiter than usual. “I think I'm dying,” he moaned.

“Everybody's dying, Boyce,” Eddie said. “Interns who spam my email account tend to die sooner, so knock it off.”

“But my little finger just moved.”

Eddie walked toward his desk. “If my hands weren't so sore, my middle finger would be moving with a message for you.”

Boyce persisted, shadowing him. “No, I mean it moved by itself,” he said. “That's a spasm. What if it's Parkinson's?”

“Have you been surfing on-line medical pages again? Last time you thought you had rabies.”

Boyce was indignant. “There was a sparrow in my bedroom the last time.”

“I know, I know—and it was acting all crazy.”

“There's no cure once rabies sets in.”

Eddie sighed and rubbed his temples. “Boyce, the sparrow went crazy because it got locked in your house. Wild animals don't appreciate indoor living.”

“What about my finger?”

“Keep it off the panic button.”

Boyce stopped and considered the advice. He called after Eddie, “Keyes is looking for you.”

“Good. I'm looking for him.”

Eddie left the intern in his wake and settled gingerly in at his desk. The overcoat he had left at the funeral home was over the chair.
God bless you, Melissa
.

The day's edition of The Empire was on his desk. Eddie scanned it—no mention of Danny Nowlin. He slapped it down. His hand throbbed.
There wasn't going to be any follow-up, was there?

A receptionist had taped a pink while-you-were-out message to his computer: Congressman Hippo Vaughn had called the newsroom three times.

Eddie paged the congressman.

Vaughn called back in two minutes. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

“On ice.”

“I found some things you'll want to know.”

Eddie cleared his throat. He took a deep breath and pushed it out in a huff. Vaughn didn't like to be disappointed. “No hurry, Hippo,” he said. “I'm not as hot for that info as I was.”

“What!” The cry burrowed into Eddie's eardrum. “Goddammit,” Vaughn raged. “Are you bagging this like Clemens did in the eighty-six World Series?”

“Something like that.”

Hippo Vaughn did not give up easily—or ever, really. “There's a candlelight rally to save the old church tonight at six,” he said. “I gotta wave the flag there before Manny Eccleston and his henchmen tear it down. See my press staff when it's over. They'll have something for you.”

“Can it wait a day?” Eddie said. “I'm feeling a little beat up, Congressman.”

“Don't get formal with me, you little shit,” Vaughn shouted. “You'll be there.” Click.

***

Franklin Keyes was in his office, behind the desk. The room smelled like drugstore aftershave, a brand a high school boy would wear on a date. Keyes checked his watch when Eddie came in. “Bourque, I was going to send for you in a few minutes.”

“I have an idea to pitch,” Eddie said. “Strong stuff, but it's going to take some off-staff time to do it right. Maybe two weeks. And I'll need a photog.”

Keyes gestured for Eddie to sit down. “Wow—what happened to your hands, Ed?” he asked.

“It's nothing. This story—”

“Doesn't look like nothing,” Keyes said, interrupting. “Looks like you got into something. I'm worried.” He folded his hands on the desk and bunched his brow in a look of concern. He was baiting Eddie, but into what?

“I'm all right, Franklin,” Eddie said, using the editor's full first name, which subordinates rarely did at the office. “Let's talk journalism, all right?”

Keyes nodded.

Eddie told him about the community of addicts under the bridge, about Leo and Gabrielle and the stray cats. “At heart, this is a love story,” Eddie explained. “Leo and Gabrielle, like Romeo and Juliet with needle marks. It's fabulous material.”

Keyes shrugged. “Doesn't Romeo die in the play?”

“They both die.” He sighed. “Forget Shakespeare—that's not the best example.”

The wrinkles in Keyes' brow spread to the corners of his mouth. “What is?”

“Just look at the danger they're in under that bridge.”

“Like they're killing each other?”

“Like they have no home and they're addicted to heroin,” Eddie said. “Any injection could be fatal. Yet they're still together, as a couple. Love triumphs over all.”

Keyes grabbed a purple lollipop from his top drawer and unwrapped it with the rapt attention of a man defusing a bomb. With the pop in his mouth, he said, “Sounds like a bunch of dope addicts in love with dope.”

“Addiction isn't love,” Eddie offered. “But you could say heroin has muscled in on their relationship and made this a love triangle—all the better for the drama of the story. These people appear to be the dregs of the city, yet they have their own kind of honor and compassion.” Eddie found himself writing the story out loud. “And they have love, Frank, a deep, soul-rattling love. Our readers in suburbia pay thousands to marriage counselors in search of the love that these addicts manage to have under a goddam railroad bridge.”

Keyes shrugged. He jiggled in his chair. “Why should I care?”

Wasn't it obvious? Even to Keyes? “Because every good story is about people and their struggles,” Eddie said.

“And?”

Eddie felt his face flush. This wasn't supposed to be so hard. “Most of Lowell travels that bridge every day. The citizens of this underworld are literally right under our noses.”

Keyes paused a moment. He twirled the lollipop, and then his face creased like a raisin. He shook his head. “I'm not impressed,” he said. “Why do we want to glorify a bunch of dope fiends?”

“Nobody is glorifying anything,” Eddie answered, his voice rising. “These people are part of Lowell. We cover Lowell.”

“So why don't they get jobs?”

“You got openings for heroin addicts?”

Keyes snickered. He sucked on the pop, and then pulled it out, waved it back and forth and said, “I don't know why some reporters are drawn to this stuff. Must be some kind of liberal bent.”

He's going to torpedo the story
. “These people are as much a part of Lowell—”

Keyes cut him off. “Aren't there some respectable people you can write about?”

“What do you mean by respectable?”

“People who take lunch pails to work every day. How about them?”

Eddie's mouth dried out. “Nobody wants to read about the plane that lands safely.”

“And so who are these bridge people? The plane crashes?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Keyes leaned forward on his elbows. There was finality in his voice when he said, “If your dope-fiend friends go down in an airplane, you can write about them.”

Eddie's chest tightened. He said weakly, “You're spiking this idea?”

“Consider it spiked.”

Eddie sat quiet for a moment. He got an involuntary mental image of his resumé curling black in the flame of Leo's candle, under the bridge. Without thinking, he blurted, “What are you pulling here?”

Keyes looked at Eddie. He crushed the lollipop between his molars and chewed the candy down. Then he said, “I'm pulling your idea. And if I don't get some production out of my political reporter, I'll be pulling you off the beat.”

Eddie ignored the answer. He tried to ignore his shaking hands, decided he couldn't, and tucked them under his armpits. “You forced Phife to rewrite my shooting story, you pulled the plug on the Nowlin follow-ups and now this. What's going on, Frank?” He studied Keyes' face for a reaction and saw nothing unusual, just heated arrogance.

“I should be asking you what's going on,” Keyes said. “When this paper took you back after all these years, it expected a better return on its investment.”

“Me? What are you talking about?”

“You sensationalized the shooting. This isn't a supermarket tab.”

“That story was dead-on.”

“And now you want to glorify a bunch of drug dealers.”

“They're not dealers, they're addicts,” Eddie said, sharply.

Keyes slapped his hands over his heart and rolled his eyes. “Forgive me,” he roared. “Wouldn't want to slander their good name.”

Eddie fought to get back to his point. “What about the Nowlin follow-up stories? You can't pretend that's not news.”

Keyes shook a finger at Eddie. He lowered his voice. “That's not for you to say. This organization will act in the best interest of everyone involved, including Daniel and his family. There's no need to drag them through the mud.”

“Not if it turns out to be accidental,” Eddie said. Not likely, considering his own experience. “But what if it was murder? You gonna sweep a murder under the rug?”

“There you go, sensationalizing again,” Keyes said. He glared at Eddie. “I have sources in this town, Bourque, people who wouldn't tell you the time if you had a subpoena, and going by what they tell
me
, you got it all wrong.” Keyes paused, looked down at his desk and said, “There was no murder.”

Keyes' position did give him contact with the city's powerbrokers, including the police. But what could he have learned about Danny?

Somebody knocked three times on the glass door.

The editor waved that somebody into the office. Detective Orr. She was out of uniform, taking “plain clothes” too literally in a long tan dress that hung like a sack.

Eddie stood when she entered. Pain zapped him in the hip.

Orr slapped her silver metal briefcase on Keyes' desk and clicked the locks open.

Keyes watched her open the case. “Detective, you didn't have to come all the way here for this.” To Eddie, he said, “Weren't you just leaving?”

“Mr. Bourque stays,” Orr said, rooting around in her briefcase. “As I explained on the phone this morning, Mr. Keyes, we found something that belongs to this newspaper.”

Orr took a plastic zipper bag from her briefcase and plunked it on the desk. There was a cellular telephone inside, or what was left of one. The device was melted and smeared with soot. Something worse than roaming charges had gotten to Eddie's phone in the old triple-decker.

Keyes frowned at the phone, and then said to Eddie, “Did you lose something at that fire last night?”

They stared at him. The weight of their eyes pushed Eddie back into the chair.

“I don't—what fire?” he said.

Annoyed, Keyes said, “Haven't you seen the paper today?” He held up a copy. A firefighter was silhouetted against yellow flames in a two-column photo on page one.

Eddie snatched the paper from him. “I saw it,” he admitted, “but I didn't read the story.”

The headline said:

Eddie recognized the house; it was where he had fallen through the floor.

He read the story:

Detective Orr gave him time to read to the end, and then said, “The firefighter who was stricken on the scene has four kids, Mr. Bourque. In grade school.”

Is she accusing me of arson?

“I don't know anything about this fire,” he insisted.

Keyes suggested, “Maybe you lent your company cell phone to some arsonists, and they roughed you up when you asked for it back? Or are those burns on your hands?”

Detective Orr looked Eddie up and down. Eddie saw her eyes linger a moment on his hands.

“Mr. Bourque and I need a place to speak in private,” she said to Keyes.